great - thanks
I’ll just counterpoint this with my anecdote: I’ve been running this mixture on my 3-4 hour rides for the last month. So far I think 7 rides in…
I feel markedly better on my rides than when I was fueling with ~250cal/hr of Tailwind. I’m up to about 1200 calories in the single bottle, using Glacier Cherry Frost Gatorade for flavor, and I actually enjoy it. Yes, you do have to wash it down with water, but it’s quite a bit easier than messing around with gels or solid food or salt tabs or refilling a bottle with more drink mix halfway through a ride. I’m lucky to have some routes where I know there are available bottle fillers or water available, so most of my rides, I carry two bottles and make one stop for restroom and water refill. The best part is by the end of the 3-4 hour ride, I’m not wasted… I feel really strong and it carries through the rest of the day. It’s been truly game changing for my long rides.
The only part of @Dr_Alex_Harrison’s plan that I don’t follow is the third bottle mount which doesn’t work on my frame. That said, carrying an additional smaller water bottle in my pocket on the rides where there isn’t easily available water isn’t an issue since I don’t have to carry food or gels anymore, just my multitool and phone. I could put a small bottle in a handlebar bag, but I haven’t defiled my road bike like that (yet?).
All that said, I’d agree with you that there’s really no need for this on shorter/faster races. For <1hr, I’m just using Skratch (if anything). For my 90+ min race a couple of weeks ago, I used about 300cal of Tailwind and a bottle of Skratch. But I’d totally do this for a 3hr road race, so long as I knew I could get additional water along the way.
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Totally agree. For crits or any race under 90 minutes (XC MTB, short road circuit races, cyclocross), Michelle (pro, RD, wife etc!) and I will just do a more dilute solution because aint nobody got time for drinking from 2 bottles every time a drink is needed. To heck with dental health! 
Reasons for the concentrate approach:
1. Dental health
2. Ability to store very high carbs & electrolyte amounts, without being forced into consuming sub-optimally high-concentration solution, exclusively. As in. If you want to carry 500g carbs plus 5000mg sodium in solution at ride start, but only have capacity for 2 liters of fluid and want to stop for a water top refill mid-ride, the concentrate approach is wiser than being forced into consuming 25% carb solution for the first 1-2 hrs of your ride. You can instead concentrate the front bottle and consume sips of it while drinking enough fresh water to keep net concentration of solution consumed at closer to 8-14%, then once your fresh water bottle is ran dry, refill both.
3. Having the flexibility to titrate fuel/electrolytes vs. fluid, as demanded by temps, sweat rate, effort level etc.
If you are not concerned about the above reasons, there is no reason not to split all carbs & electrolytes across all bottles evenly.
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One thing I tried for a race was to use a 500ml soft flask with a high concentrate, which I put in my jersey pocket, because I only had space for one bottle on the bike. You could easily have two bottles on a road bike though, and maybe don’t need to stop? I like the soft flask because it wouldn’t hurt as much crashing on it, and it gets smaller with use. It was a bit difficult to get out of my pocked though, so will need to work on that.
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I use two 250 ml soft flasks ,I can use the other bidon for extra water this way.
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Lyne and wolftooth both make some cool products for mounting 2 bottles where only one bottle mount exists on a frame. I carry 2x600mL bottles on my size large 2020 Scott Spark, within the frame triangle, and could probably fit 1 x 700mL + 1 x 600mL bottle if I really pressed the issue. Can’t remember if I’ve got lyne or wolftooth’s setup on there! Both are awesome.
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See my reply above, to @splash
Just passing it along because I thought it might be interesting to you.
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I only have the one road frame, and it’s the same one I race. Swapping bottle cages is a hassle (and the bolts specialized uses for frame attachment suck to the point I just use regular nickel screws from the hardware store now). I liked the idea of the velcro-attachable one, and it is very secure. I’ll use it on my TT/tri rig eventually but it just doesn’t work on the Venge. If I didn’t run a Varia and have a Di2 port on the back of my seatpost, that’d be where it would go.
For now, route selection with available water and an extra bottle in my jersey pocket if needed will have to suffice. But your recipe and plan have been game-changers for my long rides. So much less hassle and I feel 100% better on the long rides.
Thanks for posting!
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According to the latest research, the optimal maltodextrin / Fructose ratio is 1 : 0.8
So if I want about 200 kcal for a 750ml water bottle for medium intensity:
-30g Maltodextrin 114kcal (28.5g CHO)
-24g Fructose 95kcal (24g CHO)
Total: 209 kcal 52.5g CHO
Is that enough for a drink or should I add more electrolytes ??
Is it enough to just add salt ? About 700mg?
How many grams of salt would you recommend adding to a 750ml can?
See the I love carbs topic. Think you asked the same thing there.
Update: Used this for a few years now… its spot on!! Still works great, no changes to the recipe at all… even got me through the Celtman as 100% of my nutrition, several 70.3’s etc
Can you cite it here? I’d love to catch up on anything I’ve missed, especially if it’s very clear-cut that 1 : 0.8 is optimal over, say, 1 : 0.9, and for what scenarios specifically.
700-1500mg of sodium.
This is a really great thread, but it’s also a bit overwhelming because there’s so much information. I hope you don’t mind me asking questions that have already been answered. So I understand the ideal ratio is 2:1 glucose:fructose (or variants of this ratio). Am I right in thinking that malto breaks down into glucose, so 2:1 malto:fructose is still on target? And sucrose is also 2:1 glucose:fructose? So if I mix my own drink with malto (which I prefer) and table sugar, it needs to be 1:1 (or thereabouts) to get up to the right fructose content. Is this about right?
I’m on a three day road bikepacking trip and I like the maltodextrin/table sugar mix bottle as part of my fueling strategy. I put 40 grams malto+30 grams sugar, a pinch of salt and an electrolyte tab. I put three of these mixes in cling film balls and they have held up, happy with how it works. The packages look rather suspect though.
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Sucrose is 1:1 glucose:fructose
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Thank you
Whats your opinion on using honey/maple syrup as a base for drink/gel? Honey+maltodextrin? Maple syrup+maltodextrin?
Just want to say thanks to everyone who has contributed to this. We did our first couple of rides with malto+sugar and things went very well. This may completely change they way we fuel.
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Happy to help!
Yes, quick maltodextrin explainer here. Good timing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT25IRYiLFM
Sucrose = glucose + fructose.
Posting fructose explainer to our channel in a couple hours. Glucose explainer early next week.
Somewhere between that and 1:1 is most likely, but it remains debated. I opt for closer to 1:1 in most cases.
Correct, if targeting 2:1 glucose:fructose.
Adding any amount of malto to sugar, up equal parts malto to sucrose, will probably work well.
More info here on rates of intake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-1JJqMblvc
Both are close to 1:1 with honey exceeding 1;1 in favor of fructose. Honey also has more other stuff in it, IIRC. ~30% “other stuff” … ish.
I can never remember all this so I’m putting into an app I’m writing with a SWE from Google. If you know any SWE’s wanting to work on an app to fuel training… we could use another hand with experience in coding app UI’s. Our design is good and finalized in Figma, but getting it into code is another story! Our MVP is in beta testing. Getting the nutrition math into code is not hard because I can spell it out in depth, and our lead dev is a math wiz. But we need another dev to expedite the whole process and would love for that person to be someone who rides bikes and cares about fueling! (ie… I want to add to our team a mythical app UI SWE who wants to code an app they’ll actually use themselves, which is completely SPEC’d out already, for fueling/nutrition/hydration).
Yep! That’ll work great if you like those flavors in training! I upchucked up maple syrup once in a college track workout and have had an aversion since then. 
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